Introducing My Accounts and permissions

March 5, 2013

We recently released our latest update to Reports and one of the key features added was the ability for you to manage your own users via My Accounts - everything from resetting lost passwords to creating new users. You can also control the users ability to download data, remove replies and other important tasks.

My Accounts and managing your users

The starting point for managing users is creating an 'administrator' user for your account. To do this, just respond to the message that appears when you click 'My Accounts' or drop your account manager an email to get this set up for you. We would normally make your existing user an administrator user with all the associated permissions.

Administrator or Admin users can create and edit the users in their own company as well as any company who is below them in the company tree. Think of it as a family tree. Your company is at the top of the tree and your clients accounts are all children below.

So, if you are one of our clients and you're always having to email us about forgotten passwords or people joining your company who need a new user creating, let us know who'd you'd like to become the account administrator. You can have multiple administrators in one account as well.

Administrators can also request monthly compare reports to be automatically sent as well as managing the rating types visible in the replies section.

Permissions

I mentioned permissions earlier, and some of you may not have heard the term before. Permissions are just a short hand way of saying the ability to do something. If you don't have the permission for something, the system will not let you do that.

So, if a user does not have the 'edit user' permission, they will not be able to do anything to users. If they don't have the 'edit company' permission, likewise they wont be able to edit ratings or report schedules. If a user doesn't have either, they wont have access to My Accounts.

You can only give other users permissions to do things you can do. So if your user doesn't have access to delete form data, you will not be able to create users who can do this either.

In the user section of My Accounts you can hover over each permission to see a brief reminder of what it does, and here is a summary of some of the most important.

Edit users and edit company These permissions control editing user details and editing company details. This means if someone gets married it's easy to alter their surname, or if they forget their password after a long break they can quickly be reassigned a new one.

Delete form data and replies These two permissons allow you to delete incoming replies (maybe from a send to a small group of internal testers) that you no longer want to see. It also allows you to potentially delete form data; in some cases you may still need to ask us enable this for some forms but even then, users without this permission will not be able to delete form data.

Download data Without this permission, users will only be able to download certain bits of summary data. They wont be able to download full details (such as individual email addresses) from the CRM control, for instance.

Messenger permissions These control if the user can use the Messenger system to create campaigns or manage your data lists, and if they can also submit new campaigns to be sent.

You should try and give a user only the minimum permissions needed to get things done, so to help we've grouped the permissions and then ordered them from least to most powerful.

Hopefully this gives you everything you need to get started with these exciting new features, and we look forward to welcoming your first administrator shortly.